I’m going to be posting more on Wallace Stevens shortly. I’ve gone and taken all poetry courses this semester (all except one) and they all happen to be all poets of the last 100 years (Modernists, T.S. Eliot, American 1970 – 2005, Contemporary Canadian). It’s going to be quite fruitful for LADP – we’re going to have excesses on excesses of my favourites. Are you excited? I am.

The first poem that hit me in the side of the face this year is Wallance Stevens’ ‘The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain’. Stevens is quite an interesting character; he lived a double life between his poetry and his ambition as a lawyer and business person. I dont have very much more information as it is only the second week of class and I am still learning how to sit in a desk.

The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.